Join us on Crowdcast as we virtually welcome Kerri Arsenault and her debut Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. After the reading, Arsenault will be in conversation with local author Bathsheba Demuth, followed by a Q&A.

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ABOUT THE BOOK:

A galvanizing and powerful debut, Mill Town is an American story, a human predicament, and a moral wake-up call that asks: what are we willing to tolerate and whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe, earning the area the nickname “Cancer Valley.”

Mill Town is an personal investigation, where Arsenault sifts through historical archives and scientific reports, talks to family and neighbors, and examines her own childhood to illuminate the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease. Mill Town is a moral wake-up call that asks, Whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

ABOUT KERRI ARSENAULT:

Kerri Arsenault is a book critic, book editor at Orion Magazine, and a contributing editor at Lit Hub. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Lit Hub, Air Mail, Freeman’s, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, among other publications. She is also a mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program, graduated with an MFA from the New School, and and previously studied in the Master Programme in communication for development at Malmö University, Sweden. Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains is her first book.

ABOUT BATHSHEBA DEMUTH:

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian at Brown University, specializing in the United States and Russia, and in the history of energy and past climates. She has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America.